Abstract
For openers, what sort of title is this? Over the years I have witnessed journalists’ celebrations take many forms, from the purchase of so much champagne that the celebrant passed out under his desk accompanied by someone else’s wife, to abrupt fisticuffs ending with both combatants disappearing beneath an editor’s similar piece of office equipment and remaining there until the cleaners turned up in the early hours.
Mere bagatelle, however, in the offices of the Sunday Times Magazine, which is where Philip Norman arrived soon after catching the eye of upwardly mobile Harry Evans, then editor of the Northern Echo in Darlington. Boogying on table tops presumably was far more Sixties for the supercharged, mostly young talents there.
The mercurial Evans was soon editor-in-waiting at The Sunday Times, where Norman, of the Echo’s sister, the Northern Dispatch, having won its magazine’s competition for writers, also headed at the age of 23. Having dealt in his memoir with his early years on the Isle of Wight, when a splintered family faced ever-lurking penury, he records dismissing the idea of university before plunging into journalism with the Hunts Post. The book remains of mild interest until, having arrived in London, he embraced a decade that would become of historic importance.
As editor, Evans headed what was then the hippest and arguably most powerful newspaper in the country. He flits in and out of the narrative, but there were clearly characters by the gross there to enthral the young Norman, reminding me of my book on the history of the Daily Mirror, nicknamed “Omission impossible” by a production wit for the same reason.
On the Sunday Times Magazine, the cast list featured prominently its editor, Godfrey Smith, a rotund epicurean who ruled benignly over his “young rips” and encouraged them with frequent champagne parties.
The new recruit was soon offered his first assignment. The Sunday Times was to be part-sponsor of yachtsman Francis Chichester’s bid to make the first solo circumnavigation of the world since 1895. There were to be weekly reports of his progress, preceded by an interview and a colour spread on the adventurer’s boat, Gipsy Moth IV, and with Harry’s connivance Norman was to be the magazine’s man at the helm, so to speak.
“Harry and I felt you were the ideal candidate, dear boy,” said Godfrey, “‘since you come from the Isle of Wight, so presumably know all about sailing.” Reflects the author, “I’d never once set foot in a sailboat, and couldn’t even swim…”
Initially, it seemed Norman’s editorial services were required so rarely, he might become as familiar as the office wallpaper, if not as useful. But as the years passed, an eclectic collection of subjects – Diana Dors, PG Wodehouse, Colonel Gaddafi, Eric Clapton, best friend George Harrison - appeared.
In America – an annual location for Norman later in his career – strongman Charles Atlas, whose face and figure adorned advertisements showing him chastising hooligans on a beach before they could kick sand in his face, still looked nut-brown and in good shape at 76. Harry Evans was fascinated – “I can’t believe you met Charles Atlas,” Evans called out to me one afternoon…. “I took his bodybuilding course when I was at school.” It had to be true, observes Norman, “for there was an editor who’d never have sand kicked in his face”.
Evans, not really known for springing personal surprises, emerged less favourably when Norman received a complaint from actor film-maker Richard (“Dickie”) Attenborough. Interviewing him at Pinewood studios and his home on Richmond Green, Norman got little beyond a stream of gush about the big-star friends with whom he’d packed the cast of Oh! What A Lovely War, like “darling Larry Olivier”, “darling Johnny Gielgud” and “darling Johnny Mills”. Godfrey Smith came up with the headline “Darling Dickie”.
Admitting that his piece was “lamentably thin”, the author writes: “Harry sent for me. ‘That was a vicious piece about Dickie Attenborough,’ he said when I was barely through the door. He opened the copy of the magazine on his lectern and began picking out the guiltiest phrases.” Colleague Philip Oakes told Norman: “Underneath that northern puritanism, our Harry is about as starstruck as they come.”
Norman found himself in thrall to lovieland when, taking over from Godfrey a project that would produce a piece of 5,000 words, he flew to Munich and travelled onward to Salzburg and the location of Where Eagles Dare. In situ were the Burtons, one of the rare occasions when Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were together even though only one, Burton, was working on the film.
Norman was a member of a late-night drinking school with Burton and his entourage when they were interrupted by an intruder who resisted their lack of interest by producing a handgun that subsequently proved to be the real thing. When Taylor arrived unexpectedly and furiously to berate Burton for nocturnal carousing, the intruder put away the gun, only to start waving it again after she retired.
What a story! But Norman ruminated: “The newspaper reporter in me wanted to phone it straight to the Sunday Times’s news desk for use that weekend: ‘BURTONS FACE MYSTERY GUNMAN IN MOZART CITY’. On the other hand, it was a God-given intro to my profile…” He chose the second route, with nobody in the office seeming to object after it was written.
Norman’s book on The Beatles, Shout!, about which he doesn’t make much fuss here, became an international bestseller and is still in print. Doubtless, such a triumph provided impetus to further journalistic and literary success, but not pursuing the tale of the man with a gun suggests it is his undoubted talent as a writer, rather than an intrepid reporter, that will be his legacy.
Fair enough. The breadth of his work, and the quality of much of it, fully justify his view that, “for me, the end of the Sixties was less a tragedy than a measure of the distance by which life had exceeded my expectations. I’d begun them as a shabby, self-hating teenager for whom the future seemed to hold nothing; I ended them – literally, in December 1969 – on tour with Eric Clapton”.
Wait, there is more. “…the Magazine had provided almost every bit of clothing I possessed, the IBM golfball typewriter I used at home, the wafer-thin gold Omega on my wrist, my white gold Sheaffer pen, my Dunhill cigar cutter, the very alligator wallet, from Smythson of Bond Street, into which I packed its inexhaustible blue fivers…The feeling of absolute job security…” Not to mention often returning from the United States by ocean liner, perhaps to avoid exhaustion.
Ah yes, Mr Norman, but apart from that, did you really enjoy it?
